Next steps, post-Big Cleanup

[Larry Sanger]

Now that the Big Cleanup is done and most of our articles are checklisted, we can now use the results for all sorts of new Big Initiatives.  So what's the next Big Thing?  Here are some ideas.

Workgroup initiative ideas
Here are some ideas that would have each workgroup do something systematically

• Mark external articles for deletion
• Stub work--expansion or deletion (or stating that they're OK as stubs?)
• Rank developed articles in order of "closeness to approval"
• De-orphan underlinked articles
• Systematically review categories (after some more rules are articulated)
• Review "status" of all checklists (this was not done very carefully, I think)
• Each workgroup creates a template listing all the top-priority articles (to begin with, up to, say, 100 topics) that have not yet been created.  The templates are strung together on one page.

General initiatives

• Review and suggest a new expanded list of workgroups; the list then needs to be put to the Council for a vote.

I'm sure you can think of some more...

[Derek Harkness]

Can we have a project to design a skin or set of skins for the wiki so that we don't look so much like wikipedia. When flipping between articles on both sites, I sometimes get mixed up as to which is which.

You suggested a while back that we make another field in the checklist for article types (e.g. list, catalog, disambiguation pages, galleries, articles, etc) can that be added now?

Some articles were checklisted as [Editors asked to check categories] so clearly that's a task that needs done at some point.

Rank developed articles in order of "closeness to approval"

Can this be review and comment on developed articles. Even a very short comment would help authors develop the article in the right direction.

[Larry Sanger]

Can we have a project to design a skin or set of skins for the wiki so that we don't look so much like wikipedia. When flipping between articles on both sites, I sometimes get mixed up as to which is which.

Sure, but this can be done anytime--it's a matter of somebody volunteering to do it.  I can't do it and Jason's too busy.

You suggested a while back that we make another field in the checklist for article types (e.g. list, catalog, disambiguation pages, galleries, articles, etc) can that be added now?

Yes, good point--I'll put that on my to do list.  But I think we should discuss what other additions might be suitable for the checklist, and then add them all at once.

Some articles were checklisted as [Editors asked to check categories] so clearly that's a task that needs done at some point.

That's above.

Rank developed articles in order of "closeness to approval"

Can this be review and comment on developed articles. Even a very short comment would help authors develop the article in the right direction.

That was the idea, anyway.

[Larry Sanger]

Any other ideas about things that we can do with our shiny new categories created by the Big Cleanup???  I need your help here...

[Russell Potter]

I think this is all an enormous step.

But it also highlights the importance of what we do next.  We have shown that we can grow, both in quantity and quality of articles, and we've worked out a fairly consistent internal structure.  Now we have to show that we are able to provide the kind of density and interconnectivity of information that will make us truly 'encyclopedic'.

Right now, if an outside person were to come to the site, they'd find some very high-quality Approved articles, and a number of other fairly strong entries.  But as soon as such a person started looking around for further resources in a given subject area, they'd fall through a patch of thin information ice.

I have a couple of thoughts about how we could most efficiently thicken this coverage.

One thought is that, within each major subject area, an Editor or Author could be designated to do some information mining within Wikipedia.  Links to WP entries could be added to a workpage, much like the Big Cleanup page, and categorized numerically (say, 1 for a top-notch entry that we could hardly improve on; 2 for an entry that we could absorb and improve; 3 for an entry so bad in terms of organization or content that we ought to find authors within CZ who can do a new entry from scratch. 

We've imported WP content before, of course. But we've not yet realized the potential we have to systematically classify *their* entries as much as ours. A list like this would, like the Big Cleanup, give a centralized source for all of us to co-ordinate our importing of material, and as more WP content was classified, this would automatically create a to-do list of the articles where CZ's energies would *best* be devoted to creating completely new content.

My second idea is related to the first.  For lack of a better term, I'd call it "clustering." The idea is to bring aboard a major entry, either toplevel or close to it, and then rank the redlinks in terms of which ones are most important to getting useful lateral content.  For example, the Literature entry is great, but it would be greater still if we had entries for Epic, epistolary novel, prosody, Modernism, etc.  These 'next-level' entries, even if some were filled at first with WP content, would *add* value to the main entry, and create in the process a 'cluster' of related articles, which would collectively begin to shed red links in favor of blue.  This might most readily be done at the Workgroup level, but one could cluster about almost any topic.  For instance, since I live in Providence, Rhode Island, I've started thinking about what entities, institutions, historical events, etc. are realed to this area, and building content that's interlinked.  Edgar Allan Poe, Providence Athenaeum, some work on the burning of the Gaspee, and other entries are the result.  I'm doing the same thing with Cleveland, Ohio, my home town.

SO .... those are my two thoughts about what to do next.  Lastly, I do think we need another wave of recruitment, at least in the humanities.  Ideally, every subject needs two or three very active editors who also author, so that we don't have an approval bottleneck.  That would provide the critical mass to accomplish both WP classification/import/new entry creation as well as clustering/interlinking related content in that subject area.